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- 8. Improving Project Performance Eight Habits of Successful Project Teams Jerry L. Wellman
- 9. IMPROVING PROJECT PERFORMANCE Copyright © Jerry L. Wellman, 2011. All rights reserved. First published in 2011 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Wellman, Jerry L. Improving project performance : eight habits of successful project teams / by Jerry L. Wellman. p. cm. 1. Project management. 2. Teams in the workplace. I. Title. HD69.P75W463 2011 658.4⬘04—dc23 2011018693 A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: November 2011 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 ISBN 978-0-230-11217-9 ISBN 978-1-137-51237-6 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-137-51237-6
- 10. CONTENTS List of Figures and Tables vii Preface ix Acknowledgements xvii Chapter 1 Project Management 1 Chapter 2 Habit # 1—Foster and Nurture a Shared Project Vision 37 Chapter 3 Habit # 2—Translate the Project Vision into Coherent Requirements 69 Chapter 4 Habit # 3—Build an Integrated Plan for Accomplishing the Vision 99 Chapter 5 Habit # 4—Continually Monitor Performance against the Plan 151 Chapter 6 Habit # 5—Acknowledge and Accommodate Both Uncertainty and Ignorance 201 Chapter 7 Habit # 6—Embrace but Control Change 235 Chapter 8 Habit # 7—Continually Act to Influence the Future 261 Chapter 9 Habit # 8—Continually Communicate 283 Epilogue 303 Appendix I 309 Appendix II 311 Notes 315 Index 321
- 11. FIGURES AND TABLES FIGURES 1.1 Leadership Involvement in Projects 10 2.1 Project Visions 46 2.2 Visual Mapping of Project Vision 56 2.3 Vision Management Arena 64 3.1 Signal Corps Specification No. 486 71 4.1 The Project Management Triple Constraint 109 4.2 Integrated Planning Has a Sequence 117 4.3 WBS and RAM 123 6.1 Earned Value Measurement and Management (Financial) Reserve 206 6.2 Baseline Schedule and Schedule Reserve 211 6.3a Critical Path 213 6.3b Revised Critical Path to Create Schedule Reserve 213 6.4 Predictive versus Adaptive (Agile) Project Management Arena 226 7.1 Requirements Change 243 7.2 A Better Approach to Change Control 249 9.1 The Communication Process 285 9.2 How We Communicate 288 9.3 Project Communications Paths 292 9.4 Customer Communications 293 TABLES 2.1 Project Vision Attributes 38 2.2 Project Vision Enables Success 39 3.1 Key Requirements Margin 95 4.1 Project Management Plan Checklist 136
- 12. viii IMPROVING PROJECT PERFORMANCE 5.1 EVMS Progress Metrics 185 5.2 Same Words but Different Meanings 198 6.1 Requirements Margin 217 7.1 Big Dig Cost Growth 236 7.2 Were the Projects Managed Well? 239 7.3 Industry Project Performance Data 240 7.4 Several Sources of Project Change 241 8.1 Risk Example 267 8.2 Response Alternatives 268 8.3 Response Alternative Analysis 271 8.4 Funded Actions Equal More Dollars 274 9.1 Kent’s Words of Estimative Probability 286 9.2 What Does That Mean? 287
- 13. PREFACE WHOM THIS BOOK IS FOR This book is for those with some practical experience with projects and project environments. The principles, examples, and recommendations herein will resonate with those who have engaged in project management activities and have no doubt been frustrated by that engagement. The intent is to help the journeyman and the craftsman better make sense of and have more influence over their environment, one that is both complex and challenging. The project environment is often not well understood, even by its practitioners. Many of the executives and man- agers overseeing, supporting, or leading project activities do not appreciate the fundamental differences between projects and other sorts of work activity. This book offers some insight into those differences, and into their consequences. The primary audience for this book is threefold. First, it is intended primarily for current project managers who will recognize situations and experiences that may be frus- trating them today. Project managers are often chosen from among the cadre of individuals who have successfully demonstrated technical skills (e.g., engineering, science, or computer programming) then thrust into project leader- ship roles with little or no training, coaching, or mentoring. This book may help you make sense of some of the dynamics and pressures that impede project success. It will also sug- gest techniques that may help you influence the likelihood of project success. Second, it is intended for organizational leaders who will recognize herein cultural, environmental,
- 14. x IMPROVING PROJECT PERFORMANCE and procedural challenges that are inhibiting the success of their project initiatives. This book points out factors within the organization and within the project teams that can be managed to facilitate, rather than impede, project success. Although it is written more from the perspective of the proj- ect manager than that of the organizational leader, it does address systemwide impediments to project success and offer insights about dealing effectively with them. Third, it is intended for other key project stakeholders, including customers who will use the results of the project activity and functional managers whose departments interact with project teams. These stakeholders will better appreciate the challenges faced by project teams and understand how stakeholders can exaggerate or minimize those challenges. Those who lack direct project management experience may find it difficult to internalize some of the specifics in this book, but the broader principles and perspectives may nonetheless prove enlightening and useful. This book does not attempt to be all things to all people, which would dilute its value to anyone. The book will likely not be useful for individuals who have no direct experience with projects or project management because it presumes some hands-on experience with projects and the organizational environment in which they are executed. Those who have found themselves thrust into a position of project management without direct experi- ence or training should wait a year or two before read- ing this book. If you are a new project manager, you may find Successful Project Management by Milton Rosenau and Gregory Githens (2005) useful.1 It is a straightforward classical description of the fundamental principles of engineering project management and a direct and specific how-to description rooted in sound principles. Leaders who find themselves suddenly responsible for overseeing a multiproject environment may find it useful to read the Rosenau/Githens book referenced above. Afterwards, you
- 15. xi PREFACE may find enlightening Project Management: Strategic Design and Implementation by David Cleland (1990),2 a book with more of an organization-wide perspective on the chal- lenges of project management. WHAT THIS BOOK IS ABOUT This book primarily looks at what it is that project teams try to accomplish, what principles are essential to proj- ect success, and why those principles are so important. It is less about specific tasks and tools, although these are mentioned as exemplars of the principles being described. Some people have written profusely and well about the mechanics of project management. There is no shortage of descriptions of project phases, tasks to be accomplished during each phase, and tools for carrying out those tasks, but practitioners seeking to understand the fundamental reasons for those tools and methods will find significantly fewer resources. This book may be helpful. This book describes eight habits that successful project teams often display. Many failed project teams have also not displayed at least some of the eight habits described. This correlation between the habits described and project success is not absolute. Projects are often challenging and complex. Thus, they can easily fail in several ways, despite the best efforts of the project team and their organization. However, more than thirty years of personal experience managing complex projects, leading project-based organi- zations, and consulting with other project-based organiza- tions has made it clear to me that practicing these eight habits improves a team’s likelihood of success. THE AUTHOR’S EXPERIENCE I have enjoyed over thirty years experience working in complex project-oriented organizations in the aerospace
- 16. xii IMPROVING PROJECT PERFORMANCE industry as an engineer, project manager, functional man- ager, and general manager. From that experience, I devel- oped a visceral understanding of how such organizations behave, how they evolve, and how their members both adapt to and shape them. The assertions herein emerged from those decades of personal experience. As a new proj- ect manager, I was fortunate to be working in an organiza- tion that understood deeply the nature of projectized work activity and was dedicated to creating an organizational cul- ture and infrastructure that enabled effective project per- formance. Several years later I joined the leadership team of a struggling project-based organization with many troubled and very few successful projects. I was fortunate to be joined by other leaders who shared a commitment to transform the organization into a place where project success was the norm rather than the exception. We were able to build such an organization, one that developed many very effec- tive project managers and project teams, one that sustained strong project performance for several years. Recently, I have been actively consulting, teaching, and writing about the topic. This real-world experience has been complemented by an eclectic academic background, including a degree in electrical engineering, a masters degree in business, a mas- ters degree in Human Organization Development (HOD), and a PhD in Human and Organizational Systems (HOS). Both my HOD and HOS research focused on leadership and culture in complex organizations. Henry Mintzberg (1979),3 describes complex organizations as those that deal with “sophisticated innovation, the kind required of a space agency, an avant-garde film company, a factory manufac- turing complex prototypes, or an integrated petrochemical company...one that is able to fuse experts drawn from dif- ferent disciplines into smoothly functioning ad hoc project teams.” These are the sorts of organizations I have worked in and led, organizations filled with project teams that
- 17. xiii PREFACE perpetually encounter new information and must adapt to it, and organizations that must be competent users of what they learn if they are to survive. My business and industry responsibilities required close interaction with inter- and intracompany engineer- ing development and manufacturing teams. Some of these teams collaborated with other teams on major projects including the International Space Station, the Iridium sat- ellite constellations, aircraft navigation simulators, aviation electronic subsystems, computer development, and world- wide communications networks to name only a few. As an individual contributor, I have time and again witnessed groups of truly motivated and capable people collectively behaving as a very stupid organization while at other times behaving brilliantly. As a manager, I have successfully, and at times unsuccessfully, influenced the organizational work activities and systems to make them more efficient and to avoid recurring problems. As a leader, I have built cul- ture and infrastructure to foster organizational and proj- ect competence. As a member of industrywide councils, I have witnessed the efforts of customers, peer companies, and suppliers as they struggle with similar challenges. I’ve seen just how difficult it is to build organizational project competence, and just how fragile that competence can be. Those experiences, the successes and the failures, left their mark having taught me a few lessons about how projects and project-based organizations should behave, and why they often do not behave as they should. These parallel paths of industry and academia give me a unique and fruitful perspective about how projects work, why they tend to succeed or fail, what project team behav- iors or habits most influence the likelihood of project suc- cess, and what organizational behaviors or habits enable or inhibit project performance. The lessons we learned were put into practice when we identified and developed new project managers, when we developed tools and
- 18. xiv IMPROVING PROJECT PERFORMANCE infrastructure to support the project teams, and when we worked with customers and suppliers. Those experiences morphed into a set of notes that I thought might one day become the foundation for a book. Several years later I found myself teaching in a graduate business program and consulting for aerospace industry businesses. At one point, I was asked by a client to quickly put together and present a two-day class on the fundamen- tals of project management. I decided to not focus on the traditional project life cycle or the traditional array of tools and techniques but instead to spend the time talking about the fundamental objectives of project teams and how they could accomplish those objectives. In other words, this was to be a course about what matters and why it matters rather than a course about what to do and how to do it. The course was developed around a discussion of the most important habits of effective project teams. It described the habits, explained why they were so important, and offered an introduction to the tools, techniques, and practices that teams could use to embody those habits. That first course was such a success that the client, GE Aviation Systems, subsequently commissioned me to conduct it with project managers, functional managers, and leaders across their organization in the United States and England. Thatmaterial,mypersonalexperience,andmystimulat- ing interactions with hundreds of managers and executives at GE became the foundation of this book. The managers who attended those sessions embraced the material and successfully put it to use. I hope the reader will find the information and insights as useful as have the people at GE Aviation Systems, Honeywell, and other businesses. HOW THIS BOOK IS ORGANIZED This book has a sequential flow. The experienced project professional should resist the temptation to skip Chapter 1,
- 19. xv PREFACE a foundational introduction to project management, proj- ect terminology, and the differences between project work activity and process work activity, because the chapter includes definitions and premises that are the foundation for the eight habits. Chapters two through five generally build on one another as they describe front-end project planning and monitoring activities. Chapters 6 through 9 address topics related more to the ongoing project execu- tion efforts. The epilogue summarizes the tenets of the book and offers advice for those who would put the eight habits into practice. This book intends to help the working project manager and project-based organization leaders benefit from my experience. Mark Twain once observed that a person who undertakes to carry a cat home by the tail learns ten times as much as the person who simply watches. Perhaps that is so. But it has been my experience that project manag- ers and project-based organizational leaders are too-often in such a panic that they fail to learn useful lessons from their repeated attempts to carry the proverbial cat by its tail. Those of you with badly scarred bodies may find this book gives you insights and perspectives that can make the next attempt at cat-carrying less painful, perhaps even successful.
- 20. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I extend a special thank you to the leaders at Honeywell, Space and Avionics Systems in Clearwater, Florida, during the 1970s and 1980s, who built and nurtured a robust project-based organization in which I was privi- leged to learn and grow as a novice project manager. Later, Jay Lovelace and the team he assembled at Space Systems Operations in Glendale, Arizona, including Randy Roberts, Bob Saunders, Bill Unger, myself, and others shared the rewarding experience of building such an organization. In the process we struggled, learned, and prevailed. I acknowledge the many people at GE Aviation Systems and other organizations who listened to my notions about project management, challenged those notions, then adapted and deployed them as appropriate for their situation. In the process I learned a great deal more about what I thought I already knew. Special thanks go to Randy Roberts who took the time to critique this work and in so doing to give me both encour- agement and honest critique. I also owe a special debt to Laurie Harting, my editor at Palgrave Macmillan who gen- tly but firmly guided me through the process of convert- ing my thoughts into the book you are now reading.
- 21. CHAPTER 1 PROJECT MANAGEMENT “Why do so many professionals say they are project manag- ing, when what they are actually doing is fire fighting?” —Colin Bentley, 1997 P roject management is an important, even vital, business competency. The Economist Intelligence Unit, a leading source of economic and business research, says, “90 percent of global senior executives and project management experts say good project manage- ment is key to delivering successful results and gaining a competitive edge.”1 No wonder, since trillions of dollars are spent annually to fund projects. The Standish Group, an organization that monitors software-development proj- ects, reported that during the 1990s in the United States, more than $250 billion was spent each year across approxi- mately 175,000 information technology (IT)–application development projects.2 The United States Department of Defense (DOD) spent about $50 billion on research, development, and test evaluation in 2010, and most of it was controlled through project-based contracts.3 Global construction-project spending was $5.3 trillion during the first six months of 2010.4 If spending is an indicator of importance, then projects have been and continue to
- 22. 2 IMPROVING PROJECT PERFORMANCE be a vital and major activity in many sectors of the world economy. The demand for advice and training about how to con- duct projects more successfully is also strong. An online search for “project management consultant” surfaced over 16 million hits, suggesting that a lot of money is being spent trying to learn how to run projects successfully. Another search uncovered 320 formal education institu- tions in the United States that currently offer a specialty in project management, including 122 certificate programs, 225 master’s degree programs, and 23 doctorate pro- grams. The Defense Acquisition University in Fort Belvoir, Virginia, has for several decades offered extensive instruc- tion and certification for program/project managers throughout the DOD and its civilian contractor commu- nity. The Project Management Institute (PMI), the lead- ing project management professional organization, offers an array of training and professional certifications to its 200,000-plus membership. Millions of dollars and hun- dreds of thousands of hours are spent annually on efforts to get more value from the massive amount of money and other resources that are being invested in projects. Yet projects very often fail to deliver as promised. McManus and Harper, in a 2008 study published by the British Computer Society, reported that “statistics show that regardless of the original budgets defined by proj- ects there is still a real issue with project overrun in terms of both cost and schedule. The study showed an average overrun of 24% on original baselined schedule and bud- get across all completed projects.”5 The Standish Group study mentioned earlier, based on a review of more than 10,000 global software projects, found that “only 35% of software projects are delivered on time, on budget and within requirements.”6 That means that about two-thirds of all such projects overran their budgets, took longer than planned, or delivered less capability than intended,
- 23. 3 PROJECT MANAGEMENT hardly a record of which to be proud. The same study also found that nearly one-third of all projects were canceled before they could be completed, and more than half of all projects cost almost twice their original estimates, cost- ing organizations about $140 billion in unplanned spend- ing. It gets worse. The Standish study also found that the software projects tackled by larger firms delivered only about 40 percent of their originally specified functional- ity. That means that more than 90 percent of the time, software development projects in large firms delivered less than half the performance promised when the project was evaluated for approval. Dr. George Eng of the University of Calgary, in Alberta, conducted a review of twenty $1 bil- lion-plus Canadian construction projects and found that every project overran its planned budget by 20 percent to 100 percent.7 Assuming that Dr. Eng’s findings are rep- resentative of the large-scale construction industry over- all, and based on an annual global construction-project expenditure of about $10 trillion,8 this business segment is incurring several trillion dollars a year of unplanned proj- ect-cost growth. The evidence is clear: Projects too seldom deliver on their promised results, and the consequences are expensive, traumatic, and destroy peoples careers. To be fair, project management is inherently challeng- ing work. Organizations and teams are often trying to develop new solutions to seemingly intractable political and technical challenges. Even simple projects often begin with daunting expectations and limited resources while fac- ing great uncertainty. It should be no surprise that success is so elusive. Nevertheless, we must do better because we currently waste too many resources—the Standish Group study estimated that American companies spent $81 billion on canceled software projects in 1995 alone—and frustrate too many lives to allow the status quo to remain. But, notwithstanding these grim statistics, not every project fails. Many projects do succeed in meeting their
- 24. 4 IMPROVING PROJECT PERFORMANCE costs, schedule, and technical objectives in spite of the challenges. Some industries, organizations, and project managers have better track records than others. Industry norms and dynamics are inherently more supportive of project activity in some arenas than in others. For example, the defense industry has significantly more overall regard for a commitment to baseline project plans than does the commercial aviation industry. Some organizational cul- tures better understand how to foster project success, valu- ing learning and the free flow of knowledge over power politics that control the flow of information. Some proj- ect managers have learned through trial and error how to tease success out of what seem to others to be chaotic situa- tions. These managers have gleaned from their experience a deep understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of various project-monitoring techniques. They have learned that some specific criteria, processes, and competencies, when plied effectively, improve the likelihood of project success. Organizations and project teams can succeed. What is more important, success does not have to be ran- dom or infrequent. Organizations and teams can take actions to improve their likelihood of success. THE EIGHT HABITS OF SUCCESSFUL PROJECT MANAGERS This book describes a set of eight habits that, when prac- ticed diligently, have improved the likelihood of project success. Some projects are less challenging than others. Some projects are doomed from the start. Indeed, just like the rest of us, project managers may occasionally suc- ceed in spite of doing everything wrong or fail in spite of doing everything right. However, the eight habits listed here have been demonstrated to be effective. Project managers who practice these habits have time and again found success more often than those who do not.
- 25. 5 PROJECT MANAGEMENT Success habit #1 – Foster and nurture a shared vision of what the project is attempting to accomplish All project stakeholders, including external or internal customers who are paying for the endeavor, senior lead- ership in the project organization, strategic partners or suppliers, functional departments (e.g., marketing, dis- tribution, sales), the project manager, and project team members have some reason to believe they have a right to influence the definition of what the project is supposed to accomplish and to determine whether it has succeeded. In an ideal world, stakeholders would have a consensus vision for the project and be able to clearly articulate that shared vision to the project manager and the project team members before the work begins. However, this is rarely the case. Instead, project teams often find themselves struggling to shape a vision from among the disparate, sketchy, and often shifting notions of various stakehold- ers. Successful project managers assume responsibility for understanding their various stakeholders’ notions of project success, and then work with those stakeholders to shape a single vision that can be accomplished. Successful project managers develop for themselves and their team a coherent project vision to guide their efforts whether or not the other stakeholders share a single vision because they know that to do otherwise is to fail. Success habit #2 – Translate the vision into a coherent set of performance specifications and requirements Customers and project sponsors may not be able to cor- rectly articulate the requirements and specifications. Requirements may also come from industry standards, company policies, or discipline best practices. Successful project managers insure that they have a coherent set of requirements and specifications that accurately reflect the stakeholders’ vision and integrate other sources of
- 26. 6 IMPROVING PROJECT PERFORMANCE requirements. Project managers use the requirements- development activity to further refine the project vision and to develop specific work-requirement activity descrip- tions that team members can accomplish. The require- ments and specifications also form the basis for standards against which the work activity is assessed. Success habit #3 – Create and maintain an integrated plan for accomplishing the specifications, requirements, and vision Some projects begin with only a sketchy plan, based on the belief that immediate action is more beneficial than plan- ning for action later, even if that early action proves later to be futile. Many projects begin with a set of disintegrated plans. That is to say, there may be a budget plan, a schedule, and a technical scope-of-work plan, but the three may have little to do with one another. The budget is often based on customer affordability or competitive pressures. The schedule is often based on an arbitrary target-completion date. The technical scope of work often contains every- thing the customer or sponsors think they can get, with- out much regard for cost or technical risk. As a result, it may be impossible to accomplish the scope of work within the desired time frame or budget—hence, a disintegrated plan. Successful project managers make sure they have a clearly articulated technical work scope that they believe the team can accomplish within the specified budget and time frame. Thus, the individual plans are compatible; they form a single, integrated project plan. Success habit #4 – Monitor the project team’s performance against the integrated plan and its progress toward the specifications, requirements, and vision They develop an array of metrics and other monitor- ing techniques that alert them to any deviation from the mutually agreed plan. Successful project managers do not
- 27. 7 PROJECT MANAGEMENT merely rely on the standard monitoring systems provided by the organization. Instead, they adapt and supplement those systems to accommodate the unique traits of each project. Certainly, plans will change as work progresses, but the project manager and the project team members are passionate about immediately recognizing the change, and the monitoring system makes that possible. The moni- toring system also enables the manager to continually mea- sure the team’s performance against the plan, enabling them to quickly adjust resources in order to stay on target. Success habit #5 – Acknowledge and accommodate both uncertainty and ignorance The team that proposes or initially plans a project makes assumptions about technology, productivity, and resources that may or may not turn out to be true. They also inevita- bly uncover things they did not know about technologies, capabilities, efficiency, and other factors that influence the project’s success. Successful project managers foster a learning and adaptive team culture that embraces uncer- tainty as a normal part of project activity. They also build in adequate margins in the budget, time, and require- ments to allow the team some flexibility in dealing with the inevitable consequences of ignorance and the uncer- tainties that are inherent in every project. Success habit #6 – Embrace but control change If uncertainty and ignorance are project realities, then change is inevitable. Change comes from many direc- tions, including but certainly not limited to, shifts in the stakeholder vision, changes in market dynamics, shifts in strategic funding priorities, and changes in resource avail- ability. Some organizations and project managers prefer to ignore change because they do not understand how or are unwilling to deal with it. Others attempt to prevent
- 28. 8 IMPROVING PROJECT PERFORMANCE change, foolishly pretending they can mandate a stable, unchanging environment. Successful project managers accept the inevitability of change. They develop and use a robust discipline for identifying, assessing, and imple- menting continual changes. Success habit #7 – Act to influence the future Teams often come to see themselves as victims—of fickle stakeholders, of poor supplier performance, of technolog- ical change, or perhaps just of bad luck. Successful project managers reject the victim mentality and instill that atti- tude in their teams. Rather than becoming overwhelmed by their environment and circumstances, successful man- agers and their teams anticipate and actively work to shape their environment, thereby improving their chances of success. They may not always succeed in shaping the envi- ronment, but they are always trying to do so. As a result, their odds of success improve. Success habit #8 – Communicate Practicing the other seven habits relies on good communi- cation. A team must communicate effectively if it hopes to shape and build stakeholder and team-member consensus around a shared vision. A team must communicate effec- tively if it hopes to quickly identify, assess, and implement change. Successful project managers are passionate and effective communicators both within and outside the team. They also build a project team culture that values learn- ing, knowledge sharing, and effective communication. FOUNDATIONAL PREMISES The eight habits of successful project managers are built on a set of fundamental premises about the nature of proj- ect management. Understanding those premises will help
- 29. 9 PROJECT MANAGEMENT you better understand the habits and apply them appro- priately in your own projects. Premise one: Project management is general manage- ment. It has been said that project management is one of only a few general management jobs remaining in today’s highly integrated and centrally controlled organizational structures. Project managers are, by the nature of their position, tasked with making the same kinds of decisions a traditional business-unit general manager makes. They must balance near-term and long-term project objectives, costs versus the schedule and technical performance, and quality versus cost and schedule. They must balance customer satisfaction and profitability, and the compet- ing desires of various stakeholders. The eight habits are founded on the premise that project managers are in effect the general managers of their projects and must behave accordingly. Premise two: Projects succeed or fail early in their life cycle. Project managers and their organizational leaders boast about, or confess to, the consequences of those early project decisions and investments much later in the life cycle. Product development projects pass through several phases, beginning with the concept and definition phases, when the product is visualized and then translated into specifications and requirements. This is followed by the design phase, when the product is designed to meet those requirements. The resulting design is built during the manufacture and test phases. The decisions made during the early phases have great impact on the uncertainty and risk the project team will face later. Miller and Lessard, two researchers who studied the challenges of large engi- neering projects said, “Projects fail not because they are complicated, but because they face dynamic complexity. Rising to the challenge of large projects calls for shaping them during a lengthy front-end period. The seeds of suc- cess or failure are planted early.”9 The seeds of project
- 30. 10 IMPROVING PROJECT PERFORMANCE success are sewn early through vision consensus building, rigorous integrated planning, adherence to baseline con- trol discipline, and early acceptance of the challenges the team faces and the resources necessary to address those challenges. An important corollary to premise two is that top man- agement’s leverage for project success is greatest early in the project and declines steadily as the project evolves (see Figure 1.1) Sadly, most organizational leaders spend a great deal of time and energy pursuing new projects only to neglect them during the vital planning and early exe- cution stage, not reengaging aggressively until late in the project’s life when things have gone awry and there is little to be done to salvage the situation. Another corollary to premise two is that resource investment is most beneficial when done early and helps project managers to identify and address or prevent prob- lems rather than having to scramble later to overcome problems. Again, sadly, most organizations tend to under- staff and underfund projects during the early phases, asserting that teams perform better when confronted with robust challenges. Instead, teams tend to ignore potential Figure 1.1 Leadership Involvement in Projects Initiation/Planning Closeout Controlling Leader’s opportunity to influence project success Leader’s typical involvement in project
- 31. 11 PROJECT MANAGEMENT problems because they lack the resources to deal with them. They resort to merely hoping the problems will not emerge, a recipe for disaster. When organizations and project managers practice the eight habits, leaders get involved early in the project’s life, when it matters most, and need to be engaged less later in the project’s life. Premise three: Project managers and their teams are both accountable and empowered. Many organiza- tions hold their project managers accountable for proj- ect success or failure. Fewer organizations are willing to empower those managers and their teams to accomplish success. Organizations must provide adequate and timely resources. They must also make timely decisions about the inevitable resource conflicts. They must provide enabling processes, disciplines, and cultures. Some of the eight habits help project managers merit and gain the necessary empowerment. Premise four: Projects are about learning efficiency rather than resource efficiency. Organizations often restrict project resources in the mistaken belief that doing so fosters more efficient use of resources. The thought is that perhaps the team will perform at its most efficient level if budgets are trimmed, schedules are aggressive, and resources are restricted. Advocates of this position assert that the result- ing challenge will bring out the creativity in the team and yield the most efficient outcome. That is nonsense. Projects that are driven to meet overly aggressive goals and are also resource constrained tend to take unnecessary risks, risks that when they occur, cost the project far more than the price of a few more skilled people. A team that is worried about being unable to meet a critical product performance requirement will, if it has sufficient resources, be able to determine the extent of the concern and to address it early. On the other hand, a team faced with too few resources and too little time will simply hope that things
- 32. 12 IMPROVING PROJECT PERFORMANCE work out. The consequences when things do not work out are typically far direr, even catastrophic, than if the issue had been dealt with early. Early discovery of uncertain- ties and areas of ignorance makes project teams efficient. Restricting resources does not. The eight habits encourage truth telling, rapid learning, and the appropriate applica- tion of resources. Premise five: Project management is about disciplined flexibility. Project management based organizations must walk a delicate line between adopting disciplined policies, procedures, techniques, and practices and maintaining essential flexibility. No two projects are alike. Thus, no spe- cific procedure or process is suitable for every project. Each team must have the opportunity to work with process man- agers to tailor or adapt the bureaucracy to fit their needs. Certainly, teams will seek what is optimum for their projects, and process or procedure owners will seek uniform compli- ance for all projects. Organizational leaders must foster an environment wherein potential conflicts between these two interests surface quickly and are dealt with maturely. Milton Rosenau and Gregory Githens make this point quite clearly: “The best organizations avoid a rigid set of step-by-step pro- cedures for project management. Instead, the best organi- zations educate all stakeholders on the principles and allow for discretion and common sense. To be sure, templates and checklists are helpful job aids for the novice; just don’t become a slave to your tools.”10 Premise six: Project management is “predictive”; it uses a specific approach to understanding and manag- ing project activity. This book assumes readers will apply the recommendations in an environment in which pre- dictive rather than adaptive project management is prac- ticed. Adaptive project management emerged about ten years ago as an approach to managing software product development. It has since been used in a few other are- nas. However, predictive project management remains as
- 33. 13 PROJECT MANAGEMENT by far the most commonly used management approach. The eight habits described herein may or may not be as effective in an adaptive project environment. Certainly, the examples and perspectives documented herein are not about adaptive project management techniques and situations. The reader should keep these foundational premises in mind when reading about the eight habits. The habits are only relevant within the context of these foundational premises. WHERE TO FROM HERE? The reader who is a veteran project manager or a sea- soned project organization leader may elect to skip the rest of this chapter, going directly to Chapter 2 and the discussion about project vision. Remember that the chap- ters should be read in sequence because subsequent hab- its build on, or refer to, earlier habits. The remainder of this chapter addresses three topics. First, it describes the nature of project work activity as opposed to process work activity and task work activity. This material may help the uninitiated—or the battle scarred but confused—better understand why some of the habits are so vital for proj- ect managers. Second, it describes briefly the source and structure of what we think of today as project manage- ment. The material describes how modern project man- agement emerged as a practice, what it is intended to accomplish, and the purpose of some of the traditional project management tools. Third, it defines several terms commonly used when talking about project management. These terms are much more clearly articulated and used in academia and the project management literature than they are in practice. The material sorts out those differ- ences. Fourth, it describes the functions of project man- agement, explaining how the traditional plan, organize,
- 34. 14 IMPROVING PROJECT PERFORMANCE lead, control (POLC) model applies to project manage- ment. This brief description may help the reader better understand why some of the eight habits exist and what they are intended to achieve. A PROJECT IS A TYPE OF WORK The work organizations perform is generally one of three types: tasks, processes, or projects. These are alike in that all three are done to accomplish a goal, require resources, and produce some sort of output. But, they also have important differences that influence how they should be planned, monitored, and controlled. The eight habits help project teams address the unique characteristics of project work activity. Tasks occur throughout an organization all the time. A technician at Toyota’s Georgetown, Kentucky, automo- bile production plant calibrates a piece of equipment used to align steering columns. A work team unloads a freight- car load of tires. A clerk fills out a purchase order to replace worn-out safety vests. These are examples of tasks: relatively short-duration work activities intended to accom- plish a particular result one time. The activity is generally ad hoc, requiring little or no advanced planning or prepa- ration. Tasks seldom involve large groups of people. Processesarealsofoundeverywhereinanorganization. The production line process at that Toyota Georgetown plant manufactures about 400,000 automobiles a year.11 The inventory-control and distribution process assures that materials are available to support the manufactur- ing line. The equipment-calibration processes ensure that production and test equipment performs as intended. The training and operator-certification processes ensure that employees understand how to properly operate equip- ment. A process is a form of recurring work activity that attempts to produce the same product or service output
- 35. 15 PROJECT MANAGEMENT over and over again. One fundamental and critical mea- sure of process success is repeatability, making a process a fundamentally different type of work activity than a task. Projects are also found throughout organizations. Executives at the Georgetown plant decide to build a new warehouse to replace an older, less secure facility. The pro- duction director decides to launch a project to develop, install, and train employees on a new software package that will better manage factory inventory. The organiza- tion authorizes a project to modify the production line to enable it to yield 20 percent more volume. A project is a complex, one-time work activity requiring significant resources, robust coordination, and a significant amount of time. It has a distinct beginning and end. No project is exactly like another one, just as no task is exactly like another one. A project is essentially a long-duration and complex “task,” which, unlike a standard task, demands planning and sophisticated monitoring and control. In practice, a project may also include some amount of repetitive process work as well as unique work. For exam- ple, a project team designs and develops a cockpit display for a new airplane then provides several hundred such displays over a period of time. (Some would prefer to call such work activity a program rather than a project. More will be said about this distinction later.) Initially, the work activity is unique as it focuses on creating the new design and building, then testing the prototype. Later the work becomes more process oriented as the team begins build- ing several hundred units, although as a practical matter, each unit in such a small-volume production lot is often suf- ficiently different from the others to justify it being called a “project” rather than process work activity. The project also has process work activities that enable the early prod- uct-development stage of the work. For example, the team establishes a process for identifying, validating, and sharing changes to their initial design plan. The team also adopts a
- 36. 16 IMPROVING PROJECT PERFORMANCE configuration change control process to deal with the many changes that will occur. So, like tasks, projects are unique, and they may also require a limited amount of recurring work output like a process. However, projects require more preparation and planning than tasks, and they typically do not deliver a large amount of recurring product or service output. Just as projects may include process work, processes may also rely on projects to accomplish a one-time work activity. For example, a process team establishes a project to select and install a new, more energy-efficient, sheet metal stamping machine that will make the process more efficient. As another example, a process team learns that dipping assemblies in an acid bath before they are painted improves adherence and significantly reduces the number of units that must be repainted, so it puts together a project to design, build, install, and test a new acid-bath system. One should not be overly concerned about a bright- line distinction between projects and processes. It is more useful to think of a spectrum of interacting work types running from the brief ad hoc task, to unique but complex project work that requires significant planning, to recur- ring process work, acknowledging that all three types of work may overlap. This does not, however, diminish the need to understand the different nature of each type or to manage them differently. Projects and process work both demand planning and control. With projects, the emphasis is on planning, whereas control plays an important supporting role. With processes, the emphasis is on keeping the process under control, whereas planning plays a lesser support- ing role. However, the nature of the two types of work imposes unique demands on those planning and control activities. Efficient, productive, and relevant project and pro- cess work are essential elements of overall organizational
- 37. 17 PROJECT MANAGEMENT success. Leaders must make sure that their organizations select worthy projects, provide the resources to enable project success, and monitor the performance of those projects to confirm that resources are being used effec- tively to accomplish the project objectives. Yet, this is much easier said than done. As the earlier examples illustrated, projects often cost and take much longer than planned, sometimes completely failing to accomplish their goals, and thus wasting precious time and resources. Leaders must also make sure their organizations understand their processes, maintain process stability, continually improve process performance, and modify or replace those pro- cesses as often as needed to keep up with new technolo- gies and market pressures. Processes are also vulnerable to erratic performance or even collapse. Too often, they unpredictably yield poor-quality outputs that increase costs and dissatisfy customers. Projects and processes share several important charac- teristics that influence how leaders deal with them. Both activities are an effort to accomplish some result, to per- form work. People are actively engaged in both activities. Both project and process work activity must be planned, executed, and controlled in order to accomplish the desired outcomes. Both projects and processes must be accomplished with limited resources in terms of people, time, money, facilities, and equipment. Processes and proj- ects may occur at any level of the organization from the individual employee to a department to the whole corpo- ration. These similarities lead to some commonality in management and oversight. The classical functions of man- agement (planning, organizing, staffing, controlling, and directing) certainly apply to both projects and processes. The danger is that leaders will appreciate the similarities and be unaware of, or disregard, the critical differences. At the same time, there are important differences between projects and processes, which are at least as
- 38. 18 IMPROVING PROJECT PERFORMANCE important as the similarities. A project has a defined begin- ning and a defined end. For example, a project team may be tasked to install and test a new stamping machine in a foundry. The project begins with a decision to buy the new machine and ends when the new machine is approved for use on the production line. A process, on the other hand, is a recurring activity. For example, the process for assem- bling 50-inch flat-screen television sets may yield 1000 sets a day. The process cycle itself has a beginning and an end—the cycle starts with the gathering of the parts and ends with an assembled set ready to be shipped—but, unlike a project, the work does not change; it is repeated over and over again. This difference means that leaders should monitor and assess projects differently than they do processes. Project performance is measured differently than process performance. Typical project performance met- rics include assessments of cost versus plan, schedule ver- sus plan, and actual work accomplished versus planned cost and schedule. Project metrics may also include key progress milestone completions, such as product-design verification, design-document release, qualification test- ing, and first-article build. Many of these metrics are indi- cators of progress along a planned path to completion. Typical process metrics include process stability, yield, and cycle-time. These metrics are indicators of stability, consistency, and efficiency over time. Leaders must put the appropriate metrics in place and make sure that they are monitored and that appropriate actions are taken in response to the data. Another difference between projects and processes is the nature of learning. Process activity improves as the organization iteratively learns how to most efficiently accomplish the same activity. The process team seeks to understand how to make the process more consistent, faster, and less expensive. It can observe the process over
- 39. 19 PROJECT MANAGEMENT and over again. Projects, on the other hand, attempt to accomplish unique work activities that are not repeated. Project learning is focused on one-time discovery of new relevant knowledge for one-time use on a specific project. Certainly, project teams and their organizations can ben- efit from the learning on a particular project. In fact, they may well apply some of that learning to future projects. The distinction is that process teams are primarily focused on learning for the sake of improving a recurring activity while project teams are primarily focused on learning for the sake of accomplishing a unique activity. Any recurring leverage is potentially beneficial to the organization, but not to the active project. Consider a process team that is working on an assem- bly line paint process for automobiles. It uses statistical process data to confirm that the paint is being applied precisely as intended. It also continually looks for ways to improve the process that will make the paint application more consistent, faster, less expensive, or higher quality. What the team learns is applied to a process that is per- formed thousands, perhaps even millions, of times. The team searches for evidence of variation and for the causes of that variation. It also looks for minute changes that can save a few cents, eliminate a few seconds of processing time, or reduce variation because saving a few cents, or a shaving a few seconds off each process cycle quickly adds up to become a significant benefit to the overall process and the organization. Consider a project team working to install a new, automated, warehouse retrieval system. The team will be doing this work only once. It cannot make use of statisti- cal process tools because there is nothing repetitive about what they have set out to do. Instead, it will apply project planning and control techniques to forecast how best to accomplish this unique work activity. The project team seeks to learn how the new retrieval system works, how it
- 40. 20 IMPROVING PROJECT PERFORMANCE must be adapted to interface with existing systems, and perhaps how existing systems must be adapted to enable the interconnections. The team is searching out the major issues that may prevent the new system from being usable, that may force the team to do a great deal of unplanned work, or, alternatively, that may lead to unexpected oppor- tunities to create new retrieval capabilities. It is not inter- ested in small improvements. It is interested in major risks or opportunities that may imperil or enable the project’s success. The staffing activity is also different between processes and projects. Project teams assemble for the duration of the project then disband while process teams may remain in place for long periods of time. Thus team building, role definition, and day-to-day task assignments differ greatly. Each project team member’s role must be defined uniquely for each new project and may change over the course of the project because each project involves a unique com- bination of stakeholders, technologies, resources, capa- bilities, and requirements all of which may change as the project evolves and the team learns. On the other hand, a process team may redefine roles infrequently, perhaps when a major process change occurs. Project teams are assembled using temporary labor and resources, assets that are moved from project to project or process to project for the duration of the work activity, while process teams are assembled and remain relatively stable for a long period of time. It is true that some long-running project teams may also have relatively stable core teams. The Space Shuttle Program, initially authorized by President Nixon in 1972, flew its final mission in July 2011. The 40-year old program was around long enough for some engineers to have begun and ended their career on the same initiative. However, programs and projects typically last for several months to a few years. As a result project managers are frequently faced with the challenge of rapidly gathering individuals
- 41. 21 PROJECT MANAGEMENT and developing them into a cohesive team focused on the new project and its agenda, something process managers face less often. Projects typically use borrowed resources while pro- cesses typically use dedicated resources, another broad generalization that communicates an important distinc- tion. Projects are commissioned, accomplish their work, and then disband. Thus, the project team members and their resources are generally assembled from various areas then dispersed after the project ends. Processes on the other hand are generally ongoing operations to which staff and resources are often permanently assigned. Project teams find themselves struggling more often and harder than do process teams to gather and retain resources. The eight habits acknowledge and accommodate these unique attributes of project work activity. Managers who practice these habits will more often find project success. MODERN PROJECT MANAGEMENT Projects, project managers and project management tech- niques of some sort have been around virtually forever. Neanderthals did project work when they planned a hunt to drive herds of beasts over cliffs. The construction of the great Egyptian pyramid at Giza about 2500 b.c. was a mas- sive project involving tens of thousands of people, millions of pounds of stone, and decades of effort. The Channel Tunnel project, begun in 1988 and finished in 1994, con- nected France and England via a 31-mile undersea rail tun- nel. The completed tunnel was identified by the American Society of Civil Engineers as one of the Seven Wonders of the Modern World. Every custom home that has ever been built, from a log cabin on the Appalachian frontier to that most recent “McMansion” in a subdivision near you, has been a project.
- 42. 22 IMPROVING PROJECT PERFORMANCE Project management as we think of it today first emerged in the late 1950s. One of the earliest compre- hensive articles on the subject was “The Project Manager” written by Paul Gaddis in 1959.12 This Harvard Business Review paper focused on the project manager’s role, his or her competencies, and the training and skills neces- sary to be successful. Bechtel, the global construction firm, first used the term “project manager” in the 1950s when referring to a manager located in a remote envi- ronment with an autonomous team. By the early 1960s Bechtel had embraced the notion of a project manager for each job.13 It was about this time that the American government began to make a “project management system” a condition for the consideration for research and development con- tracts. The government representatives had become frus- trated about having to deal with several different contacts within the contractor’s firm. The contractor’s functional organization structure caused government agents to have to deal with design engineering leaders, production lead- ers, test leaders, procurement leaders, finance leaders, and others in order to track the progress of the project. The gov- ernment’s demand for a project management system was nothing more than a desire to have the contractor name a single individual as a liaison between the contractor and the government. Such a liaison would coordinate within the contractor’s organization across the various functional departments and management hierarchies, and then rep- resent the organization when communicating with the gov- ernment customer. Firms seeking government contracts had two choices. They could completely reorganize themselves around projects rather than functional departments or they could superimpose some sort of matrix leadership struc- ture with designated project managers who would have authority across the established functional departments.
- 43. 23 PROJECT MANAGEMENT The former was a radical change while the latter, although expensive and awkward, was less radical and therefore often adopted. A few organizations have attempted to establish “pro- jectized” structures rather than matrix structures, but none lasted more than a few years, and they all appeared to fail for similar reasons. Initially, the project performance improved, customers were delighted, and organizational leaders were delighted. However, within a couple of years the organizations began to falter. First, they became less competitive as they began to bog down under the weight of redundant capabilities across each project. Each team had insisted on having independent capabilities, which were not fully utilized. Second, project teams adopted their own approaches to tools, disciplines, and techniques, making it difficult to shift people from project to project. This independence also made it necessary to maintain several different policies, procedures, and processes for accomplishing similar work. Project independence was efficient for the project in the short run but terribly inefficient for the organization in the long run. Each of the powerful and independent project teams insisted on making decisions that were opti- mal for their particular projects. Teams often refused to share their carefully chosen cadre of experts with other project teams. Each team established its own test labs, ordered its own equipment, used its own design tools, and on and on. Within a year or so it became difficult to move people from one project to another and to efficiently cre- ate new project teams because the employees were com- ing off different projects with their own unique ways of doing things. Before long, each organization collapsed under the weight of all these inefficiencies. Although the matrix (project management) structure is costly and inef- ficient, experience demonstrates that it is better than the alternative.
- 44. 24 IMPROVING PROJECT PERFORMANCE Several massive government projects, including the Manhattan Project, the Navy Polaris Missile Program, and NASA’s Apollo Program, got under way about the time the government issued its decree that contractors establish a matrix system. (The reader will notice the use of the sepa- rateterms“project”and“program”fromtimetotime.These are sometimes not the same thing, and their differences will be described later. For now, assume there is no difference between the terms.) These massive ventures represented the ultimate of two common attributes of projects: sched- ule urgency and great technical uncertainty. The projects demanded innovative approaches to planning, monitoring, and control. That demand led to more aggressive develop- ment and use of a number of project management tools, such as the program evaluation review technique (PERT) and the critical path method (CPM). PERT was specifically devised in 1958 for the Polaris Program by an office of the U.S. Navy, the prime contractor Lockheed Missile Systems, and the consulting firm Booz Allen & Hamilton. CPM was first used the same year on the construction of a new chem- ical plant but was subsequently adopted and adapted for the Polaris and Apollo programs.14 The CPM/PERT techniques have been a core part of nearly all of the traditional project management training and tool kits since then. The techniques are essentially a six-step activity, as follows: Define the project and all of its significant 1. activities or tasks. Decide what activities must precede and what 2. must follow others. Draw the network connecting all the activities. 3. Assign time and/or cost estimates to each 4. activity. Compute the longest time path (the critical 5. path) through the network.
- 45. 25 PROJECT MANAGEMENT Use the network to help plan, schedule, moni- 6. tor, and control the project. Indeed, these six steps are embedded in some of the eight habits advocated in this book. As a side note, this enthusiasm for planning and man- agement systems occurred during a period when manage- ment principles such as operations research and systems theory were at their zenith. President Kennedy’s Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, was the prime exemplar of this enthusiasm and his work to bring integration and sys- tems rigor to the DOD made a great impact on the entire aerospace and defense industry, spilling over into other industries as well. The government and the research and development (R&D) contractors originally intended the project man- agement structure to address a specific problem, the need for a single-point contractor interface with whom the government representatives could deal. It was quickly learned that the project management structure not only provides that single point interface for the government customer, but also does much more. It provides a single- point interface between the project and the contractor’s leadership team, between leadership and the project team members, between the project and the functional depart- ments, and between the contractor and the project’s sub- contractors. The project management structure also more efficiently uses what the organization knows, enabling it to better learn on the fly and to solve problems. Finally, the structure enables the organization to more efficiently use its resources and adjust those resources as each project learns. Of course, the project management structure also introduces new challenges. There is the obvious added management overhead that comes with having an addi- tional management chain (project managers as well as
- 46. 26 IMPROVING PROJECT PERFORMANCE functional managers). There is the confusion and coor- dination that arises because individuals report to two or more bosses, their functional manager and the project manager or managers. There is the inevitable conflict and competition as the project teams vie for resources to accomplish their particular work activity. There are the blurred lines of authority as project managers and teams work across functions and departments to accomplish their goals. Finally, the project management structure is one that many organizational leaders may not understand and thus may not manage appropriately. In closing this topic, I am reminded of Peter Drucker’s comment on the reporting structure for new-product devel- opment and other innovation projects. He said, “innovative efforts should never report to line managers charged with responsibility for ongoing operations....The new project is an infant and will remain one for the foreseeable future, and infants belong in the nursery. The “adults,” that is, the executives in charge of existing businesses or products will have neither the time nor understanding for the infant.”15 Project managers are responsible for nurturing and pro- tecting the project work activity. A FEW DEFINITIONS TO EASE UNDERSTANDING This section begins with definitions of three constructs: project, project management, and program. There are in practice many entirely different definitions or interpre- tations of these particular terms. For example, it is quite common in the aerospace industry to use the term pro- gram management rather than project management. In the construction industry, the term project manager is more commonly used than program manager, no matter what the size of the program/project. Firms are also not consistent in their interpretation of what a program manager or a project manager does. Some firms use program manager
- 47. 27 PROJECT MANAGEMENT as the job title for planning and control staff, the people who develop and maintain the earned-value management system (EVMS). They are essentially the project schedule and cost accountants. In these firms the project or pro- gram management function as it is described in this book is often the responsibility of an engineering department manager. In other firms the project manager is their des- ignated customer-contact person for a particular program or project; he or she may have very little decision-making authority inside the firm and exercises little influence over the project activity. Some aerospace firms use the term “program” to denote an externally funded initiative and “project” to denote an internally funded initiative, naming the managers accordingly. GE Aviation Systems currently describes the program manager as the senior customer and management interface responsible for the nonrecur- ring development and recurring build of a product or ser- vice. They also assign an engineering program manager to be responsible for the nonrecurring development activ- ity who reports to both an engineering department head and the program manager for that activity. From time to time GE may assign the same person to both roles, further confusing the uninitiated—and sometimes the initiated as well. The point is that one must be aware that local con- ventions do not always follow the established academic and business literature doctrine. The PMI acknowledges that local interpretations are rampant, stating “The diversity of meaning makes it imperative any discussion of program management versus project management be preceded by a clear and consistent definition of each term.”16 Within the past several years the academic and busi- ness literature has settled on “project management” as the preferred term, a preference that has not yet found its way into the operational world. The material in this book is tar- geted at programs or projects, program or project manag- ers, and leaders of program-or project-based organizations.
- 48. 28 IMPROVING PROJECT PERFORMANCE Thus the terms “project” and “program” may be used inter- changeably throughout the book. However, the conven- tional description of each is offered below. A project is, according to the PMI Book of Knowledge (PMBOK), “a temporary endeavor undertaken to cre- ate a unique product, service, or result.”17 The PMBOK describes a project as having three specific attributes. First, it is a temporary endeavor with a definite beginning and end. Second, a project aims to accomplish something that has not been done before (a prior team may have built a similar office building but no team has ever built this particular office building under these specific condi- tions). Third, the requirements and specifications for the product or service created by the project are “progressively elaborated.” That is to say, they are made more specific and refined as the work progresses. Project management is, according to the PMBOK, “the application of knowledge, skills, tools, and techniques to project activities to meet the project requirements.”18 The management task includes dealing with competing demands. The work scope, time available, target cost, proj- ect risks and opportunities, and quality expectations all compete with one another. The various stakeholders also have differing and perhaps competing needs and expecta- tions. The project manager and project team must referee those competitions thereby establishing, communicating, and controlling the initial requirements and their elabora- tion as the work progresses. Norman Augustine, retired CEO of Lockheed Martin Corporation said, “Unlike the life of a pilot, which has been described as long periods of utter boredom inter- spersed with moments of sheer terror, the life of a proj- ect manager might more aptly be said to be one of long periods of sheer terror interspersed with rare moments of utter boredom. It is a life willed with risk, hard work, and career exposure.”19 The “terror” a project manager
- 49. 29 PROJECT MANAGEMENT experiences may vary greatly from organization to organi- zation. The PMI tells us the project manager is “the indi- vidual responsible for managing the project,” a definition that holds up in most project-based organizations. The issue arises when one begins to explore whether the proj- ect manager has the authority and influence to accom- plish that responsibility. Some organizations bestow great responsibility, great authority, and appropriate resources on their project managers while others bestow great responsibility but no authority, thus declaring them the designated “blame-takers” when the project gets into trouble or fails. A program is, according to the PMBOK, “a group of projects managed in a coordinated way to obtain benefits not available from managing them individually.”20 The literature also often describes a program as work activity that includes both nonrecurring development and recur- ring build or delivery of a product or service; refer to the GE Aviation Systems example cited earlier. Customer is a term that may be applied in at least two distinctly different ways. First, a customer may be the exter- nal funding authority for a project. Bechtel Construction may build a new airport for the city of Denver—the city is the customer. The city government, and/or the legal entity established by the city, fund the work, establish the requirements, and monitor the progress. A customer may be internal rather than external. For example, Able Engineering Services (AES) may commission a project to upgrade the local area network throughout its engineer- ing facility. The AES management team authorizes, funds, and monitors the work activity, and the AES senior leader- ship is the customer. Second, customers may instead be the end users of a product or service. Using this defini- tion the traveling public, especially the citizens of Denver are the customers, or the “primary user community,” for the new airport. The engineers working at AES are the
- 50. 30 IMPROVING PROJECT PERFORMANCE customers, or the primary user community, for the new local area network. Thus a customer may be the funding authority, or the user community, or perhaps both. Stakeholders are those parties that have an acknowl- edged interest in project success and who believe they have a right to participate in defining project success criteria. A project many have many stakeholders, including the customers who will use the project product or service, the individual or entity that funds the project, senior leader- ship in the organization managing the project, functional departments interacting with or supporting the project, the project manager, project team members, key subcon- tractors and strategic partners, or others. A matrix is an organizational structure having more than one hierarchy. Typically, the structure overlays project management across a functional-department hierarchy. Traditional organizational structures are generally one of three types. “Functional structures” are those with hier- archies built around functional departments. The direc- tors of engineering, production, quality, finance, and so forth, report to a general manager. “Divisional or product structures” are those with hierarchies built around prod- uct or service offerings. The directors of product lines, such as soaps, detergents, polishes, and abrasives, report to a general manager. Each director may have within his or her organization engineering, production, quality, and finance activity. Matrix structures group employees by both function and product, or by function and project. Thus, employees find themselves reporting to two bosses, one in the functional chain of authority and another in the product or project chain of authority. Predictive project management is the most commonly used approach for initiating, planning, and controlling projects. It is the foundational approach advocated by the PMI and is the core philosophy behind the material in the PMBOK. The PRojects IN Controlled Environments (PRINCE)
- 51. 31 PROJECT MANAGEMENT scheme of project management, advocated in the United Kingdom by the Office of Government Commerce, is also founded on this approach. Predictive project manage- ment assumes one can reasonably predict how a project will unfold. That is to say that one can with some confi- dence reasonably predict the project scope, schedule, and cost well enough to develop a plan and monitor progress against that plan. The points herein are related particu- larly to the predictive project management approach. Adaptive project management, also sometimes referred to as “agile project management,” takes a fundamentally different approach. Adaptive project management is more often used for iterative software development and rapid commercial product development (cell phones, and per- sonal digital assistants for example), although it is currently being used experimentally in other fields. The approach acknowledges the uncertainty of the path from require- ments to finished product. Rather than drawing a detailed roadmap from start to finish, the project team focuses on understanding requirements and features, and then works to rapidly develop each feature once its requirements are fully defined. The team accomplishes as much as possible between project start and a predetermined product-design release date. This book does not directly address adap- tive project management, and the eight habits described herein are not directly applicable to agile or adaptive proj- ect management principles, although some of them may apply. THE FUNCTIONS OF PROJECT MANAGEMENT Nearly 40 years ago Peter Drucker described “five basic operations in the work of the manager. Together they result in the integration of resources into a viable grow- ing organism.”21 He said that the manager sets objectives; organizes the work activity; motivates and communicates
- 52. 32 IMPROVING PROJECT PERFORMANCE to make the team a cohesive unit; measures performance to assure progress and trigger corrective actions; and devel- ops people, including himself. Drucker’s five management operations or responsibilities still resonate in today’s lit- erature, which often describes the functions of manage- ment as planning, organizing, leading, and controlling resources and activities in order to achieve the organiza- tion’s stated purpose. Planning includes defining the strat- egy and goals and then developing a plan to accomplish those goals. Organizing involves determining what activi- ties need to be done, how they will be done, and who will do them. Leading involves the coordination and motiva- tion of the people doing the work. Controlling involves monitoring activities and adapting the plan as necessary to achieve success. Rosenau and Githens offer a complementary model specifically for project management that includes five functions: defining, planning, leading, controlling, and completing.22 They assert that project management begins with a clear definition of what the project is intended to accomplish and stakeholder concurrence with that defini- tion. The project manager then must develop a plan for accomplishing that vision and goal, just as any manager would. Rosenau and Githen’s description includes orga- nizing within this definition of the planning function. They describe leading and controlling in much the same way they would be accomplished by a traditional manager. Finally, they describe the function of completing as assur- ing the project results conform to the product require- ments and the stakeholder expectations. The PMBOK describes five project management “pro- cess groups” including “initiating,” “planning,” “execut- ing,” “closing,” and “controlling.”23 Each group could be considered a project management function. Initiation occurs when the project is authorized. It is essentially a milestone event, the project start authorization, rather
- 53. 33 PROJECT MANAGEMENT than an activity. Planning includes both the definition function and the planning functions described by Rosenau and Githens. “Executing” is the effort of implementing the plan to accomplish the defined result. “Closing” is com- parable to their version of project closure. It includes the final deliveries and the administrative closeout of activity, including disposition of assets, archiving of records, and so on. “Controlling” includes their version of that term as well as Drucker’s notion of measuring performance and accomplishments. So far, we have recognized two management functions that are somewhat unique to project management. The first is the defining of the project vision and goals. The second is the closing of the project in compliance with expectations. Both these functions arise because of the one-time nature of projects. Projects are created to accom- plish a specific result, and then they are disbanded. Thus, project managers must attend more frequently and more carefully to the start-up and the ending stages of the activ- ity. Project management also involves two other unique activities, perhaps not functions or process groups as described above, but certainly fundamental activities that project teams must attend to. They are progressive elabora- tion and the triple constraint. The progressive elaboration challenge arises in many complex product development projects. It may also arise when stakeholders have vague or conflicting perspectives about what the project is intended to accomplish. That confusion or vagueness then levies on the project team the expectation that they will help resolve the unknown or unresolved requirements. This activity is as much socio-political as it is techni- cal. The technical dimension includes determining and adapting to interfaces between systems and subsystems. It includes the selection of appropriate design architectures, determination of what functions will be implemented in
- 54. 34 IMPROVING PROJECT PERFORMANCE hardware and what in software, how the requirements will be articulated and then verified, and a host of other tech- nical factors. The socio-political dimension includes such activities as helping the customer or customers articulate their expectations (requirements), helping various stake- holders understand and negotiate their expectations, maintaining group commitment to those expectations and requirements, and facilitating consensus change as the situation evolves and the understanding about require- ments changes. Project managers often must lead their teams and the stakeholders in the initial definition and progressive elab- oration of the project requirements and specifications. Success or failure in this endeavor often means the dif- ference between project success and failure. A few of the eight habits directly address this activity. The project triple constraint is a traditional framework used to describe the other basic project management activ- ity. Conventional project wisdom contends that a project involves the relationship among three parameters: cost, schedule, and technical. The technical parameter is some- times renamed the requirements parameter, shifting the definition to address the description of the technical per- formance expectations rather than to address the techni- cal development scope of work. The technical parameter is also sometimes described as the “scope” parameter, a broader term that includes all work activity not just the technical work. No matter what term-of-art is used, and no matter what relative amount of technical activity is included in the use of the selected term-of-art, the under- lying philosophy is the same. The triple constraint argues that teams begin their work with a baseline project wherein the technical requirements can be accomplished within the established time period and for the agreed cost. The three constraints of cost, schedule, and technical/require- ments/scope are thus said to be “in balance.” Over time,
- 55. Exploring the Variety of Random Documents with Different Content
- 56. Corneille. This piece was weak, but it was not a failure. And so, when the author came to town, his tragedies were played at this theatre and drew crowds to the house. There they first saw the true tragic Muse herself on the French boards. Those rough, coarse boards of that early theatre he planed and polished, with conscience and with craft, and made them fit for her queenly feet; and through her lips he breathed, in sublime tirades, his own elevation of soul, to the inspiration of that shabby scene. For the first time in the French drama, he put skill into the plot, art into the intrigue, taste into the wit; in a word, he gave to dramatic verse "good sense"—"the only aim of poetry," Boileau claimed—and showed the meaning and the value of "reason" on the stage; and for the doing of this Racine revered him. As to Corneille's personality, we are told by Fontenelle—his nephew, a man of slight value, a better talker than writer, an unmoved man, who prided himself on never laughing and never crying—that his uncle had rather an agreeable countenance, with very marked features, a large nose, a handsome mouth, eyes full of fire, and an animated expression. Others who saw Corneille say that he looked like a shopkeeper; and that as to his manner, he seemed simple and timid, and as to his talk, he was dull and tiresome. His enunciation was not distinct, so that in reading his own verses—he could not recite them—he was forcible but not graceful. Guizot puts it curtly and cruelly, when he writes that Corneille was destitute of all that distinguishes a man from his equals; that his appearance was common, his conversation dull, his language incorrect, his timidity ungainly, his judgment untrustworthy. It was well said, in his day, that to know the greatness of Corneille, he must be read, or be seen in his work on the stage. He has said so in the verse that confesses his own defects: "J'ai la plume féconde et la bouche stérile, Et l'on peut rarement m'écouter sans ennui, Que quand je me produis par la bouche d'autrui."
- 57. In truth, we must agree with Guizot, that the grand old Roman was irrevocably doomed to pass unnoticed in a crowd. And he was content that this should be. For he had his own pride, expressed in his words: "Je sais ce que je vaux." He made no clamor when Georges de Scudéry was proclaimed his superior by the popular voice, which is always the voice of the foolish. And when that shallow charlatan sneered at him in print, he left to Boileau the castigation that was so thoroughly given. His friends had to drive him to the defence of his "Cid" in the Academy, to which he had been elected in 1647. His position with regard to the "Cid" was peculiar and embarrassing; it was Richelieu, the jealous playwright, who attacked the successful tragedy, and it was Richelieu, the all- potent patron, who was to be answered and put in the wrong. The skirmish being ended, with honor to Corneille, he retired into his congenial obscurity and his beloved solitude. And there the world left him, alone with his good little brother Thomas, both contented in their comradeship. For in private life he was easy to get on with, always full of friendliness, always ready of access to those he loved, and, for all his brusque humor and his external rudeness, he was a good husband, father, brother. He shrank from the worldly and successful Racine, who reverenced him; and he was shy of the society of other pen-workers who would have made a companion of him. His independent soul was not softened by any adroitness or tact; he was clumsy in his candor, and not at home in courtier-land; there was not one fibre of the flunky in his simple, sincere, self- respecting frame; and when forced to play that unwonted rôle, he found his back not limber enough for bowing, his knees not sufficiently supple to cringe.
- 58. Pierre Corneille. (From the portrait by Charles Lebrun.) And in what light he was looked upon by the lazy pensioned lackeys of the court, who hardly knew his face, and not at all his worth, is shown by this extract from one of their manuscript chronicles: "Jeudi, le 15 Octobre, 1684. On apprit à Chambord la mort du bonhomme Corneille." Jean Racine came to Paris, from his native La Ferté-Milon in the old duchy of Valois—by way of a school at Beauvais, and another near Port-Royal—in 1658, a youth of nineteen, to study in the Collége
- 59. d'Harcourt. That famous school was in the midst of the Scholars' Quarter, in that part of narrow, winding Rue de la Harpe which is now widened into Boulevard Saint-Michel. On the site of the ancient college, direct heir of its functions and its fame, stands the Lycée Saint-Louis. The buildings that give on the playground behind, seem to belong to the original college, and to have been refaced. Like Boileau-Despréaux, three years his senior here, the new student preferred poetry to the studies commonly styled serious, and his course in theology led neither to preaching nor to practising. He was a wide and eager reader in all directions, and developed an early and ardent enthusiasm for the Greeks and the Latins. As early as 1660 he had made himself known by his ode in celebration of the marriage of Louis XIV.; while he remained unknown as the author of an unaccepted and unplayed drama in verse, sent to the Théâtre du Marais. Racine's Paris homes were all in or near the "Pays Latin," for he preserves its ancient appellation in his letters. On leaving college, in 1660-61, he took up quarters with his uncle Nicolas Vitart, steward and intendant of the Duchesse de Chevreuse, and secretary of her son the Duc de Luynes. Vitart lived in the Hôtel de Luynes, a grand mansion that faced Quai des Grands-Augustins, and stretched far back along Rue Gît-le-Cœur. It was torn down in 1671. La Fontaine had lodgings, during his frequent visits to Paris at this period, a little farther west on Quai des Grands-Augustins, and he and Racine, despite the eighteen years' difference of age, became close companions. La Fontaine made his young friend acquainted with the cabarets of the quarter, and Racine studied them not unwillingly. Just then, too, Racine doubtless met Molière, recently come into the management of the theatre of the Palais-Royal. An original edition of "Les Précieuses Ridicules," played a while before this time at the Hôtel du Petit-Bourbon, bears on its title-page "Privilège au Sr. de Luyne." This was Guillaume de Luyne, bookseller and publisher in the Salle des Merciers of the Palais de Justice; and at his place, a resort for book-loving loungers, we may well believe that the actor-
- 60. manager made acquaintance with the young poet, coming from his home with the Duc de Luynes, within sight across the narrow arm of the river. Not as a poet was he known in this ducal house, but as assistant to his uncle, and the probable successor of that uncle, who tried to train him to his future duties. Among these duties, just then, was the construction of the new Hôtel de Luynes for the Duchesse de Chevreuse. This is the lady who plays so prominent a rôle in Dumas's authentic history of "The Three Musketeers." The hôtel that was then built for her stands, somewhat shorn of its original grandeur, at No. 201 Boulevard Saint-Germain, and you may look to- day on the walls constructed under the eye of Jean Racine, acting as his uncle's overseer. This uncle was none too rigid of rule, nor was the household, from the duchess down, unduly ascetic of habit; and young Racine, "nothing loath," spent his days and eke his nights in somewhat festive fashion. His anxious country relatives at length induced him to leave the wicked town, and in November, 1661, he went to live at Uzés, near Nîmes, in Languedoc. Here he was housed with another uncle, of another kidney; a canon of the local cathedral, able to offer church work and to promise church preferment to the coy young cleric. Racine was bored by it all, and mitigated his boredom, during the two years he remained, only by flirting and by stringing rhymes. The ladies were left behind, and the verses were carried to the capital, on his return in November, 1663. He showed some of them, first to Colbert and then to Molière, who received the verse with scant praise, but accepted, paid for, and played "La Thébaïde"—a work of promise, but of no more than promise, of the future master hand. It was at this period, about 1664, that Racine, of his own wish, first met Boileau, who had criticised in a kindly fashion some of the younger poet's verses. Thus was begun that friendship which was to last unmarred so many years, and to be broken only by Racine's death.
- 61. With Corneille, too, Racine made acquaintance, in 1665, and submitted to him his "Alexandre." He was greatly pleased by the praise of the author of the "Cid"; praise freely given to the poetry of the play, but along with it came the set-off that no talent for tragedy was shown in the piece. It was not long before the elder poet had to own his error, and it is a sorrow to record his growing discontent with the younger man's triumphs. Racine believed then and always, that Corneille was easily his master as a tragic dramatist; a belief shared with him by us of to-day, who find Corneille's tragedies as impressive, his comedies as spirited, as ever, on the boards of the Comédie Française; while Racine's tragic Muse seems to have outlived her day on those boards, and to have grown aged and out of date, along with the social surroundings amid which she queened it. Racine's reverence for his elder and his better never wore away, and on Corneille's death—when, to his place in the Academy, his lesser brother Thomas was admitted—it fell to Racine, elected in 1673, to give the customary welcome to the new Academician, and to pay the customary tribute to his great forerunner. He paid it in words and in spirit of loyal admiration, and no nobler eulogy of a corrival has been spoken by any man. On his return to town, in 1663, Racine had found his uncle-crony Vitart living in the new Hôtel de Luynes, and in order to be near him he took lodging in Rue de Grenelle. It was doubtless at the eastern end of that street, not far from the Croix-Rouge—a step from Boileau in Rue du Vieux-Colombier, and not far from La Fontaine on Quai Malaquais. Here he stayed for four years, and in 1667 he removed to the Hôtel des Ursins. This name had belonged to a grand old mansion on the north bank of Île de la Cité, presented by the City of Paris to Jean Juvénal des Ursins, Prévôt des Marchands under Charles VI. In the old prints, we see its two towers rising sheer from the river, and behind them its vast buildings and spacious grounds extending far away south on the island. According to Edouard Fournier, a painstaking topographer, all this structure was
- 62. demolished toward the end of the eighteenth century, and over its site and through its grounds were cut the three streets bearing its name of des Ursins—Haute, Milieu, Basse. Other authorities claim that portions of the hotel still stand there, among them that portion in which Racine lived; his rooms having remained unaltered up to 1848. The street is narrow and dark, all its buildings are of ancient aspect, and on its south side is a row of antiquated houses that plainly date back to Racine's day and even earlier. It is in one of these that we may establish his lodgings. The house at No. 5, commonly and erroneously pointed out as his residence, is of huge bulk, extending through to Rue Chanoinesse on the south. No. 7 would seem to be still more ancient. No. 9 is simply one wing of the dark stone structure, of which No. 11 forms the other wing and the central body, massive and gloomy, set back from the street behind a shallow court, between these wings. In the low wall of this court, under a great arch, a small forbidding door shuts on the pavement, and behind, in a recess, is an open stairway leading to the floor above. No. 13 was undoubtedly once a portion of the same fabric. All these street windows are heavily barred and sightless. These three houses evidently formed one entire structure at first, and this was either an outlying portion of the Hôtel des Ursins, or a separate building, erected after the demolition of that hôtel, and taking the old name. In either case, there can be no doubt that these are the walls that harbored Racine. The tenants of his day were mostly men of the law who had their offices and residential chambers here, by reason of their proximity to the Palais de Justice. With these inmates Racine was certainly acquainted—the magistrates, the advocates, the clerks, of whom he makes knowing sport in his delightful little comedy, "Les Plaideurs." It was played at Versailles, "by royal command," before King and court in 1668. This was not its original production, however; it had had its first night for the Paris public a month earlier, and had failed; possibly because it had not yet received royal approval. Molière, one of the audience on that first night, was a more competent critic of its quality, and his finding was that "those who mocked merited to be mocked in turn,
- 63. for they did not know good comedy when they saw it." This verdict gives striking proof of his innate loyalty to a comrade in trade, for he and the author were estranged just then, not by any fault of Molière, and he had the right to feel wronged, and by this unasked praise he proved himself to be the more manly of the two. The piece was an immediate success at Versailles. The Roi Soleil beamed, the courtiers smiled, the crowd laughed. The players, unexpectedly exultant, climbed into their coaches as soon as they were free, and drove into town and to Racine, with their good news. This whole quiet street was awakened by their shouts of congratulation, windows were thrown open by the alarmed burghers, and when they learned what it meant, they all joined in the jubilation. Racine lived here from 1667 to 1677, and these ten years were years of unceasing output and of unbroken success. Beginning with his production of "Andromaque" in the first-named year, he went, through successive stage triumphs, to "Phèdre," his greatest and his last play for the public stage, produced on New Year's Day of 1677, at the Hôtel de Bourgogne. It was on these boards that almost all his plays were first given. Then, at the age of thirty-seven, at the top of his fame, in the plenitude of his powers, he suddenly ceased to write for the stage. This dis-service to dramatic literature was brought about by his forthcoming marriage, by his disgust with the malice of his rivals, by his weariness of the assaults of his enemies, by his somewhat sudden and showy submission to the Church—that sleepless assailant of player and playwright. He hints at the attitude of the godly in his preface to "Phèdre," assuring them that they will have to own—however, in other respects, they may or may not esteem this tragedy—that it castigates Vice and punishes Badness as had no previous play of his. Doubtless he was hardened in this decision, already made, by the hurt he had from the reception of this play in contrast with the reception of a poorer play for which his own title was stolen, which was produced within three nights of his piece, and
- 64. was acclaimed by the cabal that damned the original. Nor was it only his rivals and enemies who decried him. "Racine et le café passeront," was La Harpe's contemptuous coupling of the playwright with the new and dubious drink, just then on its trial in Paris. His mot has been mothered on Madame de Sévigné, for she, too, took neither to Racine nor to coffee. And a century later it pleased Madame de Staël to prove, to her own gratification, that his tragedies had already gone into the limbo of out-worn things. Racine's whole life—never notably sedate hitherto, with its frequent escapades and its one grand passion—was turned into a new current by his love match with Catherine de Romenet. On his marriage in June, 1677—among the témoins present were Boileau-Despréaux and Uncle Vitart, this latter then living in the same house with his nephew—Racine ranged himself on the side of order and of domestic days and nights. He gave proof of a genuine devotedness to his wife; a good wife, if you will, yet hardly a companion for him in his work at home and in the world outside. It is told of her, that she never saw one of his pieces played, nor heard one read; and Louis, their youngest son, says that his mother did not know what a verse was. The earliest home of the new couple was on Île Saint-Louis. Neither the house nor its street is to be identified to-day, but both may surely be seen, so slight are the changes even now since that provincial village, in the heart of Paris, was built up from an island wash-house and wood-yard under the impulse of the plans prepared for Henri IV., by his right hand, Sully. And in this parish church, Saint-Louis-en-l'Île—a provincial church quite at home here—we find Racine holding at the font his first child, Jean-Baptiste, in 1678. Two years later he moved again, and from early in 1680 to the end of 1684 we find him at No. 2 Rue de l'Eperon, on the corner of Rue Saint-André-des-Arts. Here his family grew in number, and the names of three of his daughters, Marie-Catherine, Anne, and Élisabeth—all born in this house—appeared on the baptismal register of his parish church, Saint-André-des-Arts. This was the church of
- 65. the christening of François-Marie Arouet, a few years later. The Place Saint-André-des-Arts, laid out in 1809, now covers the site of that very ancient church, sold as National Domain in 1797, and demolished soon after. This residence of Racine was left intact until within a few years, when it was replaced by the Lycée Fénelon, a government school for girls. There they read their "Racine," or such portions as are permitted to the Young Person, not knowing nor caring that on that spot the author once lived. From here he removed, at the beginning of the year 1685, to No. 16 Rue des Maçons. That street is now named Champollion, and the present number of his house cannot be fixed. It still stands on the western side of the street, about half way up between Rue des Écoles and Place de la Sorbonne; for none of these houses have been rebuilt, and the street itself is as secluded and as quiet as when Racine walked through it. Here were born his daughters Jeanne and Madeleine, both baptized in the parish church of Saint- Séverin—a venerable sanctuary, still in use and quite unaltered, except that it has lost its cloisters. And in this home in Rue des Maçons he brought to life two plays finer than any of their forerunners, yet, unlike them, not intended for public performance. "Esther" was written in 1689 to please Madame de Maintenon, and was performed several times by the girls at her school of Saint-Cyr; first before King and court, later before friends of the court and those who had sufficient influence to obtain the eagerly sought invitation. "Athalie," written for similar semi-public production, two years later, failed to make any impression, when played at Versailles by the same girls of Saint-Cyr. After two performances, without scenery or costumes, it was staged no more, and had no sale when published by the author. Yet Boileau told him that it was his best work, and Voltaire said that it was nearer perfection than any work of man. Indeed, "Athalie," in its grandeur and its simplicity, may easily outrank any production of the French pen during the seventeenth century. And, as literature, these two plays are almost
- 66. perfect specimens of Racine's almost perfect art and diction; of that art, wherein he was so exquisite a craftsman; of that diction, so rich, so daring, so pliable, so passionate, yet restrained, refined, judicious. In May, 1692, we learn by a letter to Boileau, Racine was still in Rue des Maçons, but he must have left it shortly after, for in November of this year he brought to be christened, in Saint-Sulpice, his youngest child, Louis. This is the son who has left us an admirable biography of his father, and some mediocre poems—"La Religion" and "La Grâce" being those by which he is best known. So that Saint-Sulpice was, already in November, 1692, the church of his new parish; and the house to which he had removed in that parish, wherein the boy was born, stands, quite unchanged to-day, in Rue Visconti. That street was then named Rue des Marais-Saint-Germain, having begun life as a country lane cut through the low marshy lands along the southern shore. It extends only from Rue de Seine to Rue Bonaparte, then named Rue des Petits-Augustins. Near its western end, at the present number 21, the Marquis de Ranes had erected a grand mansion; and this, on his death in 1678, was let out in apartments. It is asserted that it is the house of whose second floor Racine became a tenant. Within the great concave archway that frames the wide entrance door is set a tablet, containing the names of Racine, of La Champmeslé, of Lecouvreur, and of Clairon, all of whom are claimed to have been inhabitants of this house. That tablet has carried conviction during the half-century since it was cut and set, about 1855, but its word is to be doubted, and many of us believe that the more ancient mansion at No. 13 of the street was Racine's home. Local tradition makes the only proof at present, and the matter cannot be absolutely decided until the lease shall be found in that Parisian notary's office where it is now filed away and forgotten. We know that Mlle. Lecouvreur lived in the house formerly tenanted by Racine, and that she speaks of it as being nearly at the middle of the street, and this fact points rather to No. 13 than to No. 21. And we know that Mlle. Clairon had tried for a long time to secure an apartment in the house honored by memories of the great
- 67. dramatist and the great actress; for whose sake she was willing to pay the then enormous rental of 200 francs. But the tablet's claim to La Champmeslé as a tenant is an undue and unpardonable excess of zeal. Whatever Racine may have done years before in his infatuation for that bewitching woman, he did not bring her into his own dwelling! Rue Visconti. On the right is the Hôtel de Ranes, and in the distance is No. 13.
- 68. She had come from Rouen, a young actress looking for work, along with her husband, a petty actor and patcher-up of plays; for whose sake she was admitted to the Théâtre du Marais. How she made use of this chance is told by a line in a letter of Madame de Sévigné, who had seen her play Atalide in "Bajazet," and pronounced "ma belle fille"—so she brevets her son's lady-love—as "the most miraculously good comédienne that I have ever seen." It was on the boards of the Hôtel de Bourgogne that she showed herself to be also the finest tragédienne of her time. She shone most in "Bajazet," and in others of Racine's plays, creating her rôles under his admiring eye and under his devoted training. He himself declaimed verse marvellously well, and had in him the making of a consummate comedian, or a preacher, as you please. La Champmeslé was not beautiful or clever, but her stature was noble, her carriage glorious, her voice bewitching, her charm irresistible. And La Fontaine sang praises of her esprit, and this was indeed fitting at his age then. She lived somewhere in this quarter, when playing in the troupe of the widow Molière at the Théâtre Guénégaud. When she retired from those boards, she found a home with her self-effacing husband in Auteuil, and there died in 1698. The first floor in the right wing of the court of both 13 and 21 is said to be the residence of Adrienne Lecouvreur. She had appeared in 1717 at the Comédie Française, in Rue de l'Ancienne-Comédie, and had won her place at once. The choice spirits of the court, of the great world, of the greater world of literature, were glad to meet in fellowship around her generous and joyous table. Among them she found excuse for an occasional caprice, but her deepest and most lasting passion was given to the superb adventurer, Maurice de Saxe. His quarters, when home from the wars—for which her pawned jewels furnished him forth—were only a step down Rue Bonaparte from her house, on Quai Malaquais. They were at No. 5, the most ancient mansion left on the quay, with the exception of No. 1, hid behind the wing of the Institute. He died at Chambord on November 30, 1750, and at this house, May 17, 1751, there was an auction of his effects.
- 69. There came a time when the meetings of these two needed greater secrecy, and he removed to Rue de Colombier, now named Rue Jacob. The houses on the north side of this ancient street had—and some of them still have—gardens running back to the gardens of the houses on the south side of Rue Visconti. These little gardens had, in the dividing fence, gates easily opened by night, for others besides Adrienne and Maurice, as local legend whispers. Scribe has put their story on the stage, where it is a tradition that the actress was actually poisoned by a great lady, for the sake of the fascinating lover. He stood by her bedside, with Voltaire and the physician, when she was dying in 1730, at the early age of thirty-eight, in one of the rooms on this first floor over the court. Voltaire had had no sneers, but only praise for the actress, and smiles for the woman whose kind heart had brought her to his bedside, when he was ill, where she read to him the last book out, the translation of the "Arabian Nights." He was stirred to stinging invective of the churlish priest of Saint-Sulpice, who denied her church-burial. In the same verse he commends that good man, Monsieur de Laubinière, who gave her body hasty and unhallowed interment. He came, by night, with two coaches and three men, and drove with the poor body along the river-bank, turning up Rue de Bourgogne to a spot behind the vast wood-yards that then lined the river-front. There, in a hole they dug, they hid her. The fine old mansion at No. 115 Rue de Grenelle, next to the southeast corner of Rue de Bourgogne, covers her grave. In its garret, thrown into one corner and almost forgotten, is a marble tablet, long and narrow, once set in a wall on this site, to mark the spot so long ignored—as its inscription says—where lies an actress of admirable esprit, of good heart, and of a talent sublime in its simplicity. And it recites the efforts of a true friendship, which got at last only this little bit of earth for her grave. Yet a few years further on, the same wing on the court of this dingy old house sparkled with the splendid personality of Hippolyte Clairon, who outshines all other stars of the French stage, unless it be Rachel. Here she lived the life of one of those prodigal princesses, in whose rôles she loved to dazzle on the boards of the Comédie
- 70. Française, where she first appeared in 1743. It was her public and not her private performances that shocked the sensitive Church into a threat of future terrors for her. When, in the course of a theatrical quarrel, she refused to play, she was sent to prison, being one of "His Majesty's Servants," disobedient and punishable. She preferred possible purgatory to present imprisonment, and went back to her duty. To this house again came Voltaire, as her visitor this time, along with Diderot and Marmontel and many such men. Garrick came, too, when in Paris—came quietly, less eager to proclaim his ardent admiration for the woman than his public and professional acclamation of the actress in the theatre. Her parts all played, she left the stage when a little past forty, and, sinking slowly into age and poverty and misery, she died at the age of eighty in 1803. All these flashing fireworks are dimmed and put to shame by the gentle glow and the steadfast flame of the wood-fire on Racine's home hearthstone. It lights up the gloomy, mean street, even as we stand here. He was, in truth, an admirable husband and father, and it is this side of the man that we prefer to regard, rather than that side turned toward other men. Of them he was, through his over- much ambition, easily jealous, and, being sensitive and suspicious as well, and given to a biting raillery, he alienated his friends. Boileau alone was too big of soul to allow any estrangement. These two were friends for almost forty years, in which not one clouded day is known. The letters between them—those from 1687 to 1698 are still preserved—show the depth of Racine's manly and delicate feeling for his friend, then "in his great solitude at Auteuil." They had been appointed royal historiographers soon after Racine's marriage in 1677, and, in that office, travelled together a good deal, in the Ghent campaign of 1678 and again with the army in other fields. They worked together on their notes later, and gathered great store of material; but the result amounted to nothing, and they were posthumously lucky in that their unfinished manuscript was finally burned by accident in 1726.
- 71. Whether with Boileau in camp, or alone in the Luxembourg campaign of 1683—Boileau being too ill to go—or at Namur in 1692, or with the King and court at Fontainebleau, Marly, Versailles, in these royal residences where he had his own rooms, wherever he was, Racine never seemed to cease thinking of his home, that home in Rue des Maçons when he first went away, and for the last seven years of his life in Rue Visconti. When absent from home he wrote to his children frequently, and when here he corresponded constantly with his son, who was with the French Embassy at The Hague. To him he gave domestic details and "trivial fond records" of what his mother was doing, of the colds of the younger ones, and of the doings of the daughter in a convent at Melun. He sends to this son two new hats and eleven and a half louis d'or, and begs him to be careful of the hats and to spend the money slowly. Yet he was fond of court life, and, an adroit courtier, he knew how to sing royal prowess in the field and royal splendor in the palace. He had a way of carrying himself that gave seeming height to his slight stature. His noble and open expression, his fine wit, his dexterous address, his notable gifts as a reader to the King at his bedside, made him a favorite in that resplendent circle. And he was all the more unduly dejected when the Roi Soleil cooled and no longer smiled on him; he was killed when Madame de Maintenon—"Goody Scarron," "Old Piety," "the hag," "the hussy," "that old woman," are the usual pet epithets for her of delicious Duchesse d'Orléans—who had liked and had befriended him, saw the policy of showing him her cold shoulder, as she had shown it to Fénelon. From this shock, Racine, being already broken physically by age and illness, seemed unable to rally. As he sank gradually to the grave he made sedulous provision for his family, dictating, toward the last, a letter begging for a continuance of his pension to his widow, which, it is gladly noted, was afterward done. He urged, also, the claim of Boileau to royal favor: "We must not be separated," he said to his amanuensis; "begin your letter again, and let Boileau know that I have been his friend to my death."
- 72. His death came on April 21, 1699. His body lay one night in the choir of Saint-Sulpice, his parish church, and then it was carried for burial to the Abbey of Port-Royal. On the destruction of that institution, his remains were brought back to Paris, in 1711, and placed near those of Pascal, at the entrance of the lady-chapel of Saint-Étienne-du- Mont. Racine's epitaph, in Latin, by Boileau, the friend of so many men who were not always friendly with one another, is cut in a stone set in the first pillar of the southern aisle of the choir. Jean de la Fontaine began to come to Paris, making occasional excursions from his native Château-Thierry, in Champagne, toward 1654, he being then over thirty years of age. A little later, when under the protection and in the pay of the great Fouquet, his visits to the capital were more frequent and more prolonged. He commonly found lodgings on Quai des Grands-Augustins, just around the corner from young Racine, and the two men were much together during the years 1660 and 1661. La Fontaine made his home permanently in the capital after 1664, when he arrived there in the train of the Duchesse de Bouillon, born Anne Mancini, youngest and liveliest of Mazarin's many dashing nieces. Her marriage with the Duc de Bouillon had made her the feudal lady of Château-Thierry, and if she were not compelled to claim, in this case, her privilege as châtelaine over her appanage, it was because there was ampler mandate for the impressionable poet in the caprice of a wilful woman. Incidentally, in this flitting, he left behind his provincial wife. He had taken her to wife in 1647, mainly to please his father, and soon, to please her and himself, they had agreed on a separation. They met scarcely any more after his definite departure. There is a tradition that he chatted, once in a salon somewhere, with a bright young man by whom he found himself attracted, and concerning whom he made inquiry of the bystanders, who informed him that it was his son. Tradition does not record any attempt on his part to improve his acquaintance with the young stranger, or to show further interest in his welfare.
- 73. He did not entirely desert his country home, for the duchess carried him along on her autumnal visits to Château-Thierry. He took advantage of each chance thus given him to realize something upon his patrimony, that he might meet the always pressing claims on his always overspent income. He writes to Racine during one of these visits, in 1686: "My affairs occupy me as much as they're worth it, and that's not at all; and the leisure I thus get is given to laziness." He almost anticipated in regard to himself the racy saying of the Oxford don of our day of another professor: "Such time as he can save from the adornment of his person he devotes to the neglect of his duties." But La Fontaine neglected not only his duties all through life, but, more than all else, did he neglect the care of his dress. A portion of the income he was always anticipating came from his salary at one time, as gentleman in the suite of the dowager Duchesse d'Orléans, that post giving him quarters in the Luxembourg. These quarters and his salary went from him with her death. For several years after coming to town with the Duchesse de Bouillon he had a home in the duke's town- house on Quai Malaquais. This quay had been built upon the river-front soon after the death, in 1615, of Marguerite de Valois, Henri IV.'s divorced wife. The streets leading from Quais Malaquais and Voltaire, and those behind, parallel with the quays, were cut through her grounds and through the fields farther west. This was the beginning of the Faubourg Saint-Germain. To save the long detour, to and from the new suburb, around by way of Pont-Neuf, a wooden bridge was built in 1632 along the line of the ferry, that had hitherto served for traffic between the shore in front of the Louvre and the southern shore, at the end of the road that is now Rue du Bac. The Pont Royal has replaced that wooden bridge. One of the buildings that began this river-front remains unmutilated at the corner of Quai Malaquais and Rue de Seine, and is characteristic of the architecture of that period in its walls and roofs and windows clustering about the court. It was the many years' dwelling of the elder Visconti, and his death-place in
- 74. 1818. The house at No. 3 was erected early in the nineteenth century, on the site of Buzot's residence, as shall be told in a later chapter. In it Humboldt lived from 1815 to 1818. The associations of No. 5 have already been suggested. The largest builder on the quay was Cardinal Mazarin, whose college, to which he gave his own name, and to which the public gave the name Collége des Quatre- Nations, is now the Palais de l'Institut. He paid for it with money wrung from wretched France, as he so paid for the grand hôtel he erected for another niece, Anne Marie Martinozzi, widow of that Prince de Conti who was Molière's school friend. On the ground that it covered was built, in 1860-62, the wing of the Beaux-Arts at Nos. 11 and 13 Quai Malaquais. That school has also taken possession of the Hôtel de Bouillon of the cardinal's other niece, almost alongside. It had been the property of the rich and vulgar money-king Bazinière, whom we shall meet again, and he had sold it to the Duc de Bouillon. The pretty wife of this very near-sighted husband had the house re-decorated, and filled it with a marvellous collection of furniture, paintings, bric-à-brac. She filled it, also, by her open table twice a day, with thick-coming guests, some of whom were worth knowing. The hôtel came by inheritance in 1823 to M. de Chimay, who stipulated, in making it over to the Beaux-Arts, in 1885, that its seventeenth-century façade should be preserved, and by this agreement we have here, at No. 17 Quai Malaquais, an admirable specimen of the competence of the elder, the great Mansart. It is higher than he left it, by reason of the wide, sloping roof, with many skylights toward the north, placed there for the studios within, but its two well-proportioned wings remain unchanged, and between them the court, where La Fontaine was wont to sit or stroll, has been laid out as a garden. While living here he brought out the first collection of his "Contes" in 1665, and of his "Fables" in 1668. His "Les Amours de Psyché," written in 1669, begins with a charming description of the meetings in Boileau's rooms of the famous group of comrades. From this home he went to the home of Madame de la Sablière, with whom, about 1672, he had formed a friendship which lasted
- 75. unbroken until her death. This tender and steadfast companionship made the truest happiness of La Fontaine's life. For twenty years an inmate of her household, a member of her family, he was petted and cared for as he craved. In her declining years she had to be away from home attending to her charitable work—for she followed the fashion of turning dévote as age advanced—and then he suffered in unaccustomed loneliness. His tongue spoke of her with the same constant admiration and gratitude that is left on record by his pen, and at her death he was completely crushed. When he was invited by Madame de la Sablière and her poet- husband to share their home, they were living at their country-place, "La Folie Rambouillet," not to be mistaken for the Hôtel de Rambouillet. Sablière's hôtel, built by his father, a wealthy banker, was in the suburb of Reuilly, on the Bercy road, north of the Seine, not far from Picpus. The Reuilly station and the freight-houses of the Vincennes railway now cover the site of this splendid mansion and its extensive grounds. Here Monsieur de la Sablière died in 1680, and his widow, taking La Fontaine along, removed to her town- house. This stood on the ground now occupied by the buildings in Rue Saint-Honoré, nearly opposite Rue de la Sourdière. In the court of No. 203 are bits of carving that may have come down from the original mansion. Here they dwelt untroubled until death took her away in 1693. It is related that La Fontaine, leaving this house after the funeral, benumbed and bewildered by the blow, met Monsieur d'Hervart. "I was going," said that gentleman, "to offer you a home with me." "I was going to ask it," was the reply. And in this new abode he dwelt until his death, two years later. Berthélemy d'Hervart, a man of great wealth, had purchased, in 1657, the Hôtel de l'Éperon, a mansion erected on the site of Burgundy's Hôtel de Flandre. M. d'Hervart had enlarged and decorated his new abode, employing for the interior frescoes the painter Mignard, Molière's friend. The actor and his troupe had played here, by invitation, nearly fifty years before La Fontaine's coming. It stood in old Rue Plâtrière, now widened out, entirely
- 76. rebuilt, and renamed Rue Jean-Jacques-Rousseau; and on the wall of the Central Post-office that faces that street, you will find a tablet stating that on this site died Jean de la Fontaine on April 13, 1695. Madame d'Hervart was a young and lovely woman, and as devoted to the old poet as had been Madame de la Sablière. She went so far as to try to regulate his dress, his expenditure, and his morals. Congratulated one day on the splendor of his coat, La Fontaine found to his surprise and delight that his hostess had substituted it— when, he had not noticed—for the shabby old garment that he had been wearing for years. She and her husband held sacred, always, the room in which La Fontaine died, showing it to their friends as a place worthy of reverence. He was buried in the Cemetery of Saints-Innocents, now all built over except its very centre, which is kept as a small park about the attractive fountain of Saints-Innocents. The Patriots of the Revolution, slaying so briskly their men of birth, paused awhile to bring from their graves what was left of their men of brains. Misled by inaccurate rumor, they left La Fontaine's remains in their own burial-ground, and removed what they believed to be his bones from the graveyard of Saint-Joseph, where he had not been buried, along with the bones they believed to be those of Molière, who had been buried there. These casual and dubious remains were kept in safety in the convent of Petits-Augustins in present Rue Bonaparte, until, in the early years of the nineteenth century, they were removed for final sepulture to Père-Lachaise. No literary man of his time—perhaps of any time—was so widely known and so well beloved as La Fontaine. He attracted men, not only the best in his own guild, but the highest in the State and in affairs. Men various in character, pursuits, station, were equally attached to him; the great Condé was glad to receive him as a frequent guest at Chantilly; the superfine sensualist, Saint- Évremond, in exile in England, urged him to come to visit him and to meet Waller. He nearly undertook the journey, less to see Saint- Évremond and to know Waller, than to follow his Duchesse de
- 77. Bouillon, visiting her sister, the Duchess of Mazarin, in her Chelsea home. It was at this time that Ninon de Lenclos wrote to Saint- Évremond: "You wish La Fontaine in England. We have little of his company in Paris. His understanding is much impaired." Racine, eighteen years his junior, looked up to La Fontaine as a critic, a counsellor, and a friend, from their early days together in 1660, through long years of intimacy, until he stood beside La Fontaine's bed in his last illness. He even took an odd pleasure in finding that he and La Fontaine's deserted country wife had sprung from the same provincial stock. Molière first met La Fontaine at Vaux, the more than royal residence of Fouquet, at the time of the royal visit in 1661. La Fontaine wrote a graceful bit of verse in praise of the author of "Les Fâcheux," played for the first time before King and court during these festivities, and the two men, absolutely opposed in essential qualities, were fast friends from that time on. "They make fun of the bonhomme," said the ungrudging player once, "and our clever fellows think they can efface him; but he'll efface us all yet." It is needless to say that La Fontaine was beloved by Boileau, the all-loving. That kindly ascetic was moved to attempt the amendment of his friend's laxity of life, and to this blameless end dragged him to prayers sometimes, where La Fontaine was bored and would take up any book at hand to beguile the time. In this way he made acquaintance with the Apocrypha, and became intensely interested in Baruch, and asked Boileau if he knew Baruch, and urged him to read Baruch, as a hitherto undiscovered genius. During his last illness, he told the attendant priest that he had been reading the New Testament, and that he regarded it as a good, a very good book. In truth, his soul was the soul of a child, and, childlike, he lived in a world of his own—a world peopled with the animals and the plants and the inanimate objects, made alive by him and almost human. He loved them all, and painted them with swift, telling strokes of his facile pen. The acute Taine points out that the brute creations of this
- 78. poet are prototypes of every class and every profession of his country and his time. His dumb favorites attracted him especially by their unspoiled simplicity, for he loathed the artificial existence of his fellow-creatures. With "a sullen irony and a desperate resignation" he let himself be led into society, and he was bored beyond bearing by its high-heeled decorum. It is said that he cherished, all his life long, a speechless exasperation with the King, that incarnation of pomposity and pretence to his untamed Gallic spirit. Yet this malcontent had to put on the livery of his fellow-flunkies, and his dedication, to the Dauphin, of his "Fables," is as fulsome and servile as any specimen of sycophancy of that toad-eating age. Yet, able to make trees and stones talk, he himself could not talk, La Bruyère tells us; coloring his portraiture strongly, as was his way, and rendering La Fontaine much too heavy and dull, with none of the skill in description with his tongue that he had with his pen. He may be likened to Goldsmith, who "wrote like an angel and talked like poor Poll." Madame de Sablière said to him: "Mon bon ami, que vous seriez bête, si vous n'aviez pas tant d'esprit!" Louis Racine, owning to the lovable nature of the man, has to own, too, that he gave poor account of himself in society, and adds that his sisters, who in their youth had seen the poet frequently at their father's table in Rue Visconti, recalled him only as a man untidy in dress and stupid in talk. He gave this impression mainly because he was forever dreaming, even in company, and so seemed distant and dull; but, when drawn out of his dreams, no man could be more animated and more delightful.
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